resistance. During this time, ten hours or so, nothing had been discussed except opals, not even women.
This was a tough town which all through the hot months was almost entirely without women. The girls came to Coober Pedy at the beginning of autumn, around the first of June, as regularly as migrant swallows. They came in air-conditioned coaches and the first arrivals were met at the bus stop and straight away carried bodily underground. They cleaned up a packet. One wonders what would happen if an outing of lady school teachers arrived at the same time.
We quitted this amazing place with real regret and flew on eastwards over Lake Torrens, a ghastly, ghostly, dazzlingly white saline expanse, to Hawker, a pleasant little nineteenth-century town, in the middle of what used to be vast wheat fields, now sheep country, in the Flinders Ranges. Here I met Jeff Findley, who had been asked to take me into Outback country.
‘The Nips have got the six-cylinder Land Rovers licked with their Toyotas,’ he said gloomily. ‘If I was Lord Stokes I’d be real worried.’ I wrote to Lord Stokes pointing this out, but he was so unworried that he didn’t bother to reply.
We drove up through the Ranges by way of the Hills of Arkaba, where there was a sheep station but scarcely any sheep, which was not surprising considering that in this sort of country at this time of year there were probably only 10,000 sheep to 10,000 acres.
Finally, we arrived at the Parachilna Hotel, 57 miles from Hawker, but longer by the route we took, just at the moment when the sky fell in and this particular part of the Outback and a good 500 miles north of it were deluged with water.
It is almost as difficult in retrospect to remember this night at the Parachilna Hotel as it is to forget it. Difficult either way with the malt whisky flowing like beer and the beer like spring water, and Angus Donald McKenzie, the proprietor of this old and extensive hotel, playing a lament on the bagpipes, with the rain falling so thick outside that it was difficult to breathe and while all that was going on trying to listen to old Bert Rickaby, who was eighty or ninety, I forget which, but looked sixty, who the previous week had opened up his stomach with a pen knife and got out 26 ounces of fluid, presumably pure Glen Grant.
‘… so I got some salt,’ Rickaby was speaking about some more ancient affliction now, ‘cut the poisoned part three times on top and twice underneath, rubbed in salt from the lake, and then went into Maree and got piss drunk.’
The rain ended any serious attempt to reach the real uninhabited Outback. Having charged through Beltana, a ghost town deep in mud, population six families – three Aboriginal, three white – and water-courses which engulfed the transfer box on our Range Rover, all the next day we sat on the bank of Emu Creek waiting for it to subside while the mile-long trains of freight cars on the Central Australian Railway, from Alice Springs, hummed down the line triumphantly above us.
The magnificent Victorian hotels we came across might have been in the West Country. They had hitching rails outside which were not for horses any more, but had been reinforced to prevent the owners of Nissans and Toyota Land Cruisers, all fitted with winches, lifting hooks and kangaroo bars, from driving them through the retaining wall of the hotel and into the bar inside.
So far as I could make out most of the fighting in Outback pubs was on account of somebody refusing to have a beer with someone else.
‘Eric, meet Ron, John, Les, Stan, Alan, Willie, Jimmy. This is Eric from England. How about a beer, Eric?’
I stood in the wide main street outside the Birdsville Hotel in south-west Queensland, which was the epitome of all the Outback pubs I had seen, watching the sun race up behind the trees out of the Diamantina River, which was often nothing but a series of dry furrows.
The rain had accomplished what seemed almost impossible in country where the last drops of the stuff worth measuring fell four years before, a whole foot of it coming down in a single night early in March the previous year, and that was only the beginning. Since then Birdsville and its eighty-odd inhabitants had been cut off by flooding from the outside world except by air.
I had seen many interesting things during my travels round Australia. I had been to the East Alligator River on the edge of Arnhem Land, which had large and horrid estuarine crocodiles at its mouth and freshwater ones with red eyes further up. I had seen swarms of magpie geese, spoonbills, ibis and variously coloured cockatoos and lotus birds with giant feet which helped them to skid over the surface of the water lily pads, red wallaroos and wild horses up to their flanks in water, and wild Indian buffaloes with 10- and 11-foot spreads of horn.
I had been to Arkaroola in the northern Flinders Ranges on a road that was like an old-fashioned, dark red blancmange and seen the uranium mountains that were so difficult to reach that they had to use camels to get the stuff out for the Manhattan Project in 1943 and 1944, and had stayed in their shadow in a brand new motel.
I had flown hundreds and hundreds of miles, over the coal mines at Leigh Creek and the dingo fence which stretches right across South Australia from New South Wales to the west, and I had just missed being bitten by a deadly spider in the meat house of an abandoned homestead at Tea Creek, and now I just wanted to sit down quietly and think about the Outback without seeing any more of it because, quite suddenly, it had become a little too much for me.
‘You have rather walked the plank, haven’t you, Eric?’ Donald Trelford, then Deputy Editor of the Observer, said when he heard that I had decided to leave the paper and become a freelance writer. For almost ten years, from 1963 to 1973, I had been its Travel Editor, one of the few jobs in my life from which I had not been sacked and had really enjoyed.
But I was not as worried about the prospect of walking the plank as I probably should have been. I knew all about walking planks and what happened to the good guys who did so. I still remembered, back in the twenties, seeing Douglas Fairbanks Senior, suffering this fate in a film, The Black Pirate. He had been shoved off the end of one swathed in chains to the accompaniment of some frenetic work on the piano by a pianist who was located where the orchestra would have been if it had been a theatre (sometimes he would be accompanied by a drummer to simulate the sounds of gunfire). At that time all films were silent ones.
But in spite of this, now fathoms deep in the Caribbean Sea, and with apparently inexhaustible reserves of oxygen in his lungs, Fairbanks had been able to rid himself of his chains; and then, having swum under the keel, had clambered aboard the enemy vessel, found to hand a swivel gun loaded with grape shot, with which he swept the decks of the murderous scum who had tried to do him in. (At least this is how I remember it years later.)
He was a corker, Douglas Fairbanks Senior was, and he could fill a cinema such as the Broadway in Hammersmith, or the Blue Halls, over the river from where I lived in Barnes – both of which smelt strongly of disinfectant – with just the suspicion of a twirl of one of his elegant moustaches. I think he had moustaches. All this happened long before Donald Trelford was even thought of.
That year of my departure from the Observer, 1973, the year I walked the plank, was one in which, all of a sudden, everything started happening that was needed – to continue the gangplank metaphor – to keep me and the rest of our family afloat.
It was the year I was commissioned to write a history of exploration* for what seemed at that time a gigantic fee of £12,000, with the condition that the book had to be delivered in six months and that no royalties would be paid until 125,000 copies had been sold. A prodigious
